Lord Voldemort's Muggle Studies
by RaeRurounifan
Summary: Years after the war, Hermione makes an interesting connection between Lord Voldemort and one of history's greatest tyrants. She incorporates it into her Muggle Studies classes later in life. Oneshot.


_A/N: This is a little drabble-ish idea I had after reading book seven. It struck me as an interesting connection that J.K. Rowling had apparently made, so I thought I'd write my take on it. I'm sure others have done the same, but I wanted to try it._

_Disclaimer: Nothing owned, nothing earned. Entertainment purposes only. Thanks!_

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**Lord Voldemort's Muggle Studies**

**By: Rae**

-A "Harry Potter" Fanfic-

She sat curled in the chair, reading yet another book, something all who knew her well enough would have predicted of her on this balmy day in July. Her husband and friends sat in the sitting room as well, Ron and Harry playing wizard's chess while Ginny watched and made comments. It was quiet as the children were outside, doing who knows what.

Hermione turned the page in her book, her eyes narrowed in concentration, and she continued to read. The three before her were relatively quiet, though Ginny's voice occasionally broke her concentration as she cheered Harry on or chided Ron for demolishing one of Harry's pieces. It had been years since Lord Voldemort had held any sort of power, and Hermione was very grateful for the peace in the wizarding world.

Scanning the page in front of her, she noticed a picture that struck a cord in her. In it, a young girl stood in the dead of winter with her parents. All three of them were dressed warmly but looked disturbed and serious for a family picture. And all of them had a star sewn onto their shirts, above the heart.

Reading the information underneath, Hermione experienced an uncanny flashback to what would have been her seventh year at Hogwarts. It wasn't everyday that a connection like this surfaced, and she was surprised at how similar it was to what had happened. Thinking this curious, she decided to discuss it with her husband and friends. Besides, they'd been at the game for hours, and neither of them was very good at admitting defeat.

"Guys?" She asked, looking up from her book. The two men didn't notice, so intent were they on the game before them. Ginny glanced up and saw Hermione's pensive expression. Hermione glanced at the two before waving her arm at her friend, who got the message.

Harry was still deciding where to move his knight when his wife kissed him softly on the cheek and leaned over to slap her brother on the back of the head.

"Oi!" Ron yelled, pulled from his concentration of the chess pieces back to his surroundings. Her slap had done the trick, however, as Ron jumped, he flailed his arms and sent the board and pieces flying into the air.

He glared at his sister, but she only smiled serenely back and said, "Your wife wants your attention." He glared a minute more before turning to where Hermione was grinning at him.

Harry was the one who spoke. "What's up, Hermione?" He noted the book in her hands and vaguely wondered if she would be giving a lecture.

"Come here and take a look at this," she said in response, pointing at a page in particular.

The three went to crowd around their friend, Ron standing behind her chair, arms draped loosely around her shoulders while Ginny and Harry flanked her on either side. They stared down at the picture of the family with stars on their shirts. It struck Harry as something he should remember, but he couldn't quite place it. Ron and Ginny, however, just looked stumped.

"What is it, 'Mione?" Ron finally asked. Instead of answering, she pointed to the caption beneath the picture.

The three friends read it silently. When they finished, Hermione looked up shrewdly at Harry and asked, "Does that remind you of anything?"

He was puzzled for a moment before realizing what she must be talking about. "Yeah, it does. Seventh year, right?"

Hermione nodded and smiled at him for working it out. "Do you think Voldemort...?" She trailed off, brows furrowed, and looked pensively at her friends, who had moved back in front of her.

"He might have," Harry said darkly, still somewhat troubled by the wizard who tried to ruin his life. "It would certainly be ironic, wouldn't it?"

"Hey, what are you guys talking about?" Ron finally asked, exasperated, at the two who always seemed to arrive at conclusions long before he did. He looked pointedly at his wife and waved an arm for her to explain.

"Well, it's like this, Ron..."

"All right class, today we're going to discuss the connections between Voldemort's plan for Muggles and Muggle-borns and the Holocaust in Muggle history," Hermione began, smiling at her students.

She was the Muggle Studies professor at Hogwarts, and she had held this position since her children had left home to go off on their own adventures. Looking back, she wished she could have done it before, but she enjoyed being with her family, and living in the castle wasn't something they would have put up with year-round, especially with their mother being a teacher.

In the years since she'd discovered the connection between Voldemort and Hitler, Hermione had done some extensive research and come across even greater evidence for her claims, which she put into two books on the subject. Ron and Harry had supported her every step of the way, and while she didn't like piggybacking off the Boy Who Lived's fame, it did help get her books out in public faster.

Now she was deciding whether she would continue in her post as Muggle Studies professor or leave to retire with Ron somewhere off the beaten path. Harry and Ginny had left the public eye two years prior, and their kids and grandkids had gone on to do some amazing things since then. For her part, Ron had stopped working a year ago and was asking her to do the same. He lived in the castle with her and enjoyed being there where he had grown up and learned to live and love, but he wanted to move into the retirement house they'd bought five years ago.

It was a joint decision with Harry and Ginny, who wanted a small community where their families could live together in peace and avoid the unwanted intrusion of witches and wizards who were curious about the Boy Who Lived and the Golden Trio. Now they had a group of witches and wizards who had moved in together, and the community remained blissfully undisturbed, for all that it was Muggle-repellant and unplottable for the most part.

After all that had happened with the war, Harry and Ginny had eventually made new friends and learned that being at peace with everyone, friend or former enemy, was the most important thing. So they accepted friendships with people they would have otherwise never gotten along with. This prompted others, including Ron and Hermione, to do the same.

The little community now consisted of several families, most from the same years at Hogwarts, and it was quite eclectic. Harry and Ginny, Neville and Hannah, Dean Thomas, Seamus Finnegan, Luna and her husband, all lived there. Lavender Brown, who had also married, and the Patil twins and their husbands moved in as well. Even Draco Malfoy and Gregory Goyle and their wives had become friends with the Golden Trio and now had homes there.

As she considered leaving Hogwarts, however Hermione had to remind herself that there would be no one around to teach her theory properly, and she so enjoyed Muggle Studies. It gave her a sense of purpose as she went about her life. And the students all enjoyed her classes.

Gazing around the room at the mixed Gryffindors and Slytherins, Hermione was reminded of having potions with Slytherin in her years at Hogwarts. It never failed her then, and it seemed that now that she was a teacher, it never failed the two houses to have Muggle Studies together.

She began the topic of Voldemort's connection to Hitler in fifth year so that it gave the students more to chew on than earlier years but didn't overwhelm them too early. Her theory was based around the fact that both Hitler and Voldemort required the undesirables, as she called them, to register themselves with the puppet governments they created. This was to keep them under control, and as Hermione pointed out in her book, they would each have ways of gaining and maintaining control over the people they planned to subvert. She sometimes wondered if Voldemort had ever read Machiavelli's "The Prince," as his ways seemed similar to that line of thinking.

"If you've read the chapter for today, you'll be well aware of where I'm going with this subject," she explained, watching the faces before and taking note of those that seemed eagerly awaiting the subject and those who had the guilty expressions she was used to seeing from Harry, Ron and hundreds of students since them.

Walking to the book open on the podium, she read, "During the period known as the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler ordered all Jews in the countries he ruled to identify themselves, forcing them to sew yellow stars, known as the Star of David, on the breasts of their shirts and coats. This made them visible from afar and gave the Nazis the ability to identify them when they were ordered to round up Jews and take them to ghettos and concentration camps where they could easily kill them."

Looking up from the book, she said, "Now if you've been paying attention, you can easily see the connections between the two. Adolf Hitler was a tyrant, Voldemort was a tyrant. Hitler rounded up undesirables, Voldemort rounded up undesirables. Hitler created concentration camps to hold those he detested, Voldemort sent those he hated to Azkaban. The connections are numerous."

The class sat silently as she continued, "You will have heard stories about Voldemort and his reign, probably from your grandparents, and you have had lessons in Defense Against the Dark Arts where you would have been taught how to respond to situations such as the tyranny of dark wizards. What I want you to truly understand from this lesson is that even those people like Voldemort who believe themselves superior to Muggles, Muggle-borns, and Half-bloods are just as susceptible to making mistakes.

"You all know that Harry Potter vanquished the dark lord by destroying those things that anchored him to this world. In Hitler's day, the Allied forces regained power over the Nazis by coming together to attack on all fronts, taking away the Nazis' ability to fight back by dividing their forces into unstable groups. For Hitler, the mistake was in believing that he could control such a large area and be invincible. He stretched his forces too thin. For Voldemort, the mistake was in believing he knew more about magic than anyone else and thus was the only one to know the secret keeping him somewhat immortal.

"If you compare the two, you'll see that they are similar. For all we know, Voldemort could have actively studied Hitler's succession to power and his attempt to seize control of the world. We do know that Voldemort took classes during his younger years that gave him his ideas about world domination, and these classes centered around the Holocaust. Perhaps that is where his ideas of forcing Muggle-born registration and accusing Muggle-borns of stealing magic came from. He knew that Hitler had done the same with the Jews, forcing them to register themselves and accusing them of stealing all the money that rightfully belonged to the Aryan race, a race which Hitler himself did not belong to. Once again, we see that the two were similar. Voldemort was a Half-Blood while Hitler did not belong to his blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan race."

Hermione paused here and gave her students a chance to take in what she had said. She listened to the scratching of quills against parchment and smiled gently at them as she finished her lesson for the day.

"Those of you who grew up in Muggle families or had Muggle relatives will know of the Bible, a religious book many Muggles believe in," she said, noting the comprehending looks on some of the students' faces. "I believe it is appropriate to use one of the Bible's teachings to illustrate the point at the heart of this lesson. A tyrant is a tyrant, and they all behave similarly. They are rather easy to predict, despite the shock their actions sometimes cause people. Hitler did not come up with his ideas on his own. We know he gathered some of his ideas from Nicolo Macchiavelli's book 'The Prince.' And that book was written to a family known for their tyrannical takeovers in both Italy and France, the Medicis. Tyrants have been around since the beginning of time."

She paused again and then said, "The Bible teaches that there is nothing new under the sun. It's a verse written by Solomon, and what it signifies is this: no one comes up with original ideas, no one does something that no one has done before. There truly is nothing new under the sun."

Her gaze grew serious as she said, "Learn this lesson well. If you do, it could save you the heartache that so many families felt when Voldemort was in power. As you go about your lives, if some dark witch or wizard comes to power again, watch the signs. You'll see a tyrant if you look at their actions, and you'll know how to respond based on the past. I sincerely hope we've seen the last of wizarding tyrants with Voldemort, but I also know that as long as there is dark magic, there will be dark wizards. Remember this lesson."

Walking around the podium as the bell rang, Hermione told the students, "Don't forget. The homework is to write a foot on why Adolf Hitler was able to take over the Muggle countries he did so easily. Please consult your textbooks for further information and sources."

The students gathered their things and walked quickly from the room, more subdued today than normal. But this wasn't unusual. Hermione had found that as she researched the subject more, it became more and more sobering for her. She knew she wasn't paranoid, but now she had an idea of how tyrants began gathering power. She would live and learn from Voldemort and his kind. And she would be there for the next dark witch or wizard who got the idea to take over wizard kind.

As she walked through the halls of Hogwarts back to her quarters, Hermione smiled to herself. She, Ron, Harry, and Ginny would be there to make sure the world was a safer place. They, their families, and their friends would try to insure a more peaceful world, and they would do it for the good of wizardkind, just like Albus Dumbledore had taught them.

**-The End-**

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_A/N: I don't have much to say about this. If you have any questions about it, let me know, and I'll be happy to answer them. Also, please let me know what you thought. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it! _

_Until next time..._

_-Rae-  
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